Hockey pucks have traditionally been used on a playing surface made of ice. The traditional ice hockey puck design allows the hockey puck to slide across the ice surface, but often exhibits irregular movement once the surface of the ice becomes rough or the hockey puck leaves the ice.
Moreover, as hockey becomes more popular, the sport is being played in a wider variety of environments and on a mixture of different playing surfaces. Most of the alternative playing surfaces being currently used are not as conducive to the traditional ice hockey puck design for stable puck movement as the more traditional smooth ice surfaces. For example, street hockey or roller hockey may, among other places, be played on blacktop or cement in a parking lot, inside on a gymnasium floor, or on the asphalt streets. Because of the uneven nature of these other playing surfaces many custom hockey puck designs have been developed for use on non-ice surfaces.
Some of the custom hockey puck designs include rollers on the planar surfaces to reduce friction between the playing surface and the puck. Often these custom puck designs incorporate surface specific mechanisms to increase the puck stability for a specific surface, but the effectiveness of these mechanisms are often exclusive to the playing surface. Moreover, some mechanisms substantially change the performance characteristics of the puck. For example, one customized puck for use on a non-ice surface uses curved channels to maintain airflow below the boundary layer. Unfortunately, the curved nature of the channels induce the puck to preferentially spin in one direction (e.g., clockwise or counter clockwise) thereby unintentionally making the customized puck a right handed or left handed puck due to the preferred rotation inherent in the design.
In view of available custom hockey puck designs, several groups have attempted to develop hockey pucks that reduce the friction of the puck against the floor surface using rollers or runners. Unfortunately, none of these available systems can provide aerodynamic venting that uses the movement of the puck, without specific regard to the playing surface, to reduce the friction of the puck against the playing surface.